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Russian Empire
Note: this Russian Empire is diffrent from the real Russia and the Empire of Russia and has signficant revisions The Russian Empire, also known as Russia, is a country in northern Eurasia (Europe and Asia togther). It is a aboslute monarchy and autocracy and the second largest contigous empire the world has ever seen. It borders Norway, Sweeden, Poland, the Slavic States and Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, and a strip of North Korea. It also has maritime borders with Japan (by the Sea of Okhotsk) and the United States (by the Bering Strait). At 21,799,825 kilometres of land, Russia is by far the largest country in the world and consists of one sixth of the world's total land area. Russia is also the third most poplous nation with 660 million subjects. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40-50% of Europe, spanning 14 time zones and incoporating a wide range of envoirments and landforms. Russia has the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources, and has the second-largest economy on Earth. It has the world's largest forest reserves and it's lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world's unfrozen fresh water. The nation's history began with that of the East Slavs, who emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a noble Viking warrior class and their descendants, the first East Slavic state, Kievan Rus', arose in the 9th century and adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated and the lands were divided into many small feudal states. The most powerful successor state to Kievan Rus' was Moscow, which served as the main force in the Russian reunification process and independence struggle against the Golden Horde. Moscow gradually reunified the surrounding Russian principalities and came to dominate the cultural and political legacy of Kievan Rus'. By the 18th century, the nation had greatly expanded through conquest, annexation, and exploration to become the Russian Empire, which is by landmass the third largest empire in history, spanning from central Europe to the Bering Strait. Russia has established worldwide power and influence since the 17th century and is the most powerful country in Eurasia. The country is a recognized nuclear weapons power and is a infulential superpower. Russia posseses the world's largest stockpile of weapons of mass-destruction. Russia's has the second largest economy in the world after America and the third largest GDP after America, China, and Japan. It has the largest military budget in the world and the third largest atomic budget. Russia is a pernament member of the United Nations Security Council (Russian Empire), a member of the G8, G20, APEC, SCO, and the EurAsEC, and leads the Commonwealth of Monarchies. Russia boasts a long tradition in all areas of the arts and sciences, a long cultural tradition, and a powerful economic and technological tradition. History The Russian Empire is the natural sucessor to the Tsar's Kingdom of Moscow. Though the empire was only officially proclaimed by King Peter I following the Treaty of Nystad (1721), some historians argue that it was truly born when Peter acceded to the throne in early 1682. The eighteenth century Peter I, the Great (1672–1725), consolidated autocracy in Russia and played a major role in bringing his country into the European state system. From its modest beginnings in the 14th-century principality of Moscow, Russia had become the largest state in the world by Peter's time. It spanned the Eurasian landmass from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Much of its expansion had taken place in the 17th century, culminating in the first Russian settlement of the Pacific in the mid-17th century, the reconquest of Kiev, and the enslavement of the Siberian tribes. However, this vast land had a population of only 14 million at the time. Grain yields trailed behind those of agriculture in the West, compelling almost the entire population to farm. Only a small fraction of the population lived in the towns. The class of kholops, close to the one of slavery, remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great converted the household kholops into house serfs including them into poll taxation. Russian agricultural kholops were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679. Peter was deeply impressed by the advanced technology, warcraft, and statecraft of the West. He studied modern tactics and fortifications and built a strong army of 300,000 made up of his own subjects, whom he conscripted for life. The Strelets Troops were incorporated into the regular army. In 1697–1698, he became the first Russian prince to ever visit the West, where he and his entourage made a deep impression. In celebration of his conquests, Peter assumed the title of emperor as well as tsar, and Muscovite Russia officially became the Russian Empire late in 1721. Peter's first military efforts were directed against the Ottoman Turks. His attention then turned to the north. Peter still lacked a secure northern seaport except at Archangel on the White Sea, whose harbor was frozen for eleven months a year. Access to the Baltic was blocked by Sweden, whose territory enclosed it on three sides. Peter's ambitions for a "window to the sea" led him in 1699 to make a secret alliance with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark against Sweden, resulting in the Great Northern War. The war ended in 1721 when an exhausted Sweden sued for peace with Russia. Peter acquired four provinces situated south and east of the Gulf of Finland, thus securing his coveted access to the sea. There he built Russia's new capital, Saint Petersburg, to replace Moscow, which had long been Russia's cultural center. Peter reorganized his government on the latest modern models, molding Russia into an absolutist state. He replaced the old boyar Duma (council of nobles) with a ten-member senate, in effect a supreme council of state. The countryside was also divided into new provinces and districts. Peter told the senate that its mission was to collect tax revenues. In turn tax revenues tripled over the course of his reign. As part of the government reform, the Orthodox Church was, by segments and fractions, incorporated into the country's administrative structure, in effect making it a tool of the state. Peter abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with a collective body, the Holy Synod, led by a lay government official, which remains to this day. Meanwhile, all vestiges of local self-government were removed, and Peter continued and intensified his predecessors' requirement of state service for all nobles. Peter died in 1725, leaving an unsettled succession and an exhausted realm. His reign raised questions about Russia's backwardness, its relationship to the West, the appropriateness of reform from above, and other fundamental problems that have confronted many of Russia's subsequent rulers. Nevertheless, he had laid the foundations of a modern state in Russia. Nearly forty years were to pass before a comparably ambitious ruler appeared on the Russian throne. Catherine II, the Great, was a German princess who married Peter III, the German heir to the Russian crown. She contributed to the resurgence of the Russian nobility that began after the death of Peter the Great. State service had been abolished, and Catherine delighted the nobles further by turning over most government functions in the provinces to them. Catherine the Great extended Russian political control over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with actions including the support of the Targowica confederation, although the cost of her campaigns, on top of the oppressive social system that required lords' serfs to spend almost all of their time laboring on the lords' land, provoked a major peasant uprising in 1773, after Catherine legalized the selling of serfs separate from land. Inspired by another Cossack named Pugachev, with the emphatic cry of "Hang all the landlords!" the rebels threatened to take Moscow before they were ruthlessly suppressed. Catherine had Pugachev drawn and quartered in Red Square, but the specter of revolution continued to haunt her and her successors. While suppressing the Russian peasantry, Catherine successfully waged war against the Ottoman Empire and advanced Russia's southern boundary to the Black Sea. Then, by plotting with the rulers of Austria and Prussia, she incorporated easternmost territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Partitions of Poland, pushing the Russian frontier westward into Central Europe. By the time of her death in 1796, Catherine's expansionist policy had made Russia into a major European power. This continued with Alexander I's wresting of Finland from the weakened kingdom of Sweden in 1809 and of Bessarabia from the Ottomans in 1812. First half of the nineteenth century Napoleon made a major misstep when, following a dispute with Emperor Alexander I, he launched an invasion of the Emperor's realm in 1812. The campaign was a catastrophe. Although Napoleon's Grande Armée made its way to Moscow, the Russians' scorched-earth strategy prevented the invaders from living off the country. In the bitterly cold Russian winters, thousands of French troops were ambushed and killed by peasant guerrilla fighters, and sometimes totured by them. As Napoleon's forces retreated, the Russian troops pursued them into Central and Western Europe and to the gates of Paris. After Russia and its allies defeated Napoleon, Alexander became known as the 'savior of Europe,' and he presided over the redrawing of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1815), which made Alexander the monarch of the Kingdom of Poland. Although the Russian Empire would play, and continue to play, a leading political role in the next century, secured by its defeat of Napoleonic France, its retention of serfdom precluded economic progress of any significant degree. As West European economic growth accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, which had begun in the second half of the 18th century, Russia began to lag ever farther behind, creating new problems for the empire as a great power. Russia's status as a great power obscured the inefficiency of its government, the isolation of its people, and its economic backwardness. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I had been ready to discuss constitutional reforms, but though a few were introduced, no thoroughgoing changes were attempted. The relatively liberal emperor was replaced by his younger brother, Nicholas I (1825–1855), who at the onset of his reign was confronted with an uprising. The background of this revolt lay in the Napoleonic Wars, when a number of well-educated Russian officers traveled in Europe in the course of the military campaigns, where their exposure to the liberalism of Western Europe encouraged them to seek change on their return to autocratic Russia. The result was the Decembrist Revolt (December 1825), the work of a small circle of liberal nobles and army officers who wanted to install Nicholas' brother as a constitutional monarch. But the revolt was easily crushed, leading Nicholas to turn away from the modernization program begun by Peter the Great and champion the doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. After the Russian armies occupied the allied Georgia in 1802, they clashed with Persia over control of Azerbaijan and got involved into the Caucasian War against mountaineers, which would lumber on for half a century. Russian emperors had also to deal with two uprisings in their newly acquired territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: the November Uprising in 1830 and the January Uprising in 1863. The harsh retaliation for the revolt made "December Fourteenth" a day long remembered by later revolutionary movements. In order to repress further revolts, schools and universities were placed under constant surveillance and students were provided with official textbooks. Police spies were planted everywhere. Would-be revolutionaries were sent off to Siberia; under Nicholas I hundreds of thousands were sent to katorga there. The question of Russia's direction had been gaining steam ever since Peter the Great's programme of modernization. Some favored imitating Western Europe while others were against and called for a return of the traditions of the past. The latter path was championed by Slavophiles, who heaped scorn on the "decadent" West. The Slavophiles were opponents of bureaucracy, preferred the collectivism of the mediaeval Russian mir, or village community, to the individualism of the West. Alternative social doctrines were elaborated by such Russian radicals as Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin. Second half of the nineteenth century Emperor Nicholas died with his philosophy in dispute. One year earlier, Russia had become involved in the Crimean War, a conflict fought primarily in the Crimean peninsula. Since playing a major role in the defeat of Napoleon, Russia had been regarded as militarily invincible, but, once pitted against a coalition of the great powers of Europe, the reverses it suffered on land and sea exposed the decay and weakness of Emperor Nicholas' regime. When Alexander II came to the throne in 1855, desire for reform was widespread. A growing humanitarian movement, which in later years has been likened to that of the abolitionists in the United States before the American Civil War, attacked serfdom. In 1859, there were more than 23 million serfs living under conditions frequently worse than those of the peasants of western Europe on 16th-century manors. Alexander II made up his own mind to abolish serfdom from above rather than wait for it to be abolished from below through revolution. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was the single most important event in 19th-century Russian history. It was the beginning of the end for the landed aristocracy's monopoly of power. Alexander II levied a heavy tax on former owners and masters of serbs, exacting from them thousands of rubles, and giving them to the pesants, plus large amounts of farmland, as a gift. Industry was stimulated, free labor poured into the cities, and the middle class, once a small group of intellctuals below the noblity, grew by more then five hundred times with the addition of millions of pesants. In the late 1870s Russia and the Ottoman Empire again clashed in the Balkans. From 1875 to 1877, the Balkan crisis escalated with rebellions against Ottoman rule by various Slavic nationalities, which the Ottoman Turks suppressed with what was seen as great cruelty in Russia. Russian nationalist opinion became a serious domestic factor in its support for liberating Balkan Christians from Ottoman rule and making Bulgaria and Serbia independent. In early 1877, Russia intervened on behalf of Serbian and Russian volunteer forces when it went to war with the Ottoman Empire. Within one year, Russian troops were nearing Constantinople, and the Ottomans surrendered. Russia's nationalist diplomats and generals persuaded Alexander II to force the Ottomans to sign the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, creating an enlarged, independent Bulgaria that stretched into the southwestern Balkans. When Britain threatened to declare war over the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano, an exhausted Russia backed down. At the Congress of Berlin in July 1878, Russia agreed to the creation of a smaller Bulgaria. As a result, Pan-Slavists were left with a legacy of bitterness against Austria-Hungary and Germany for failing to back Russia. The disappointment as a result of war stimulated revolutionary tensions in the country. This made Russia very angry against Britain for the next 20 years. Following Alexander's assassination by the Narodnaya Volya, a Nihilist terrorist organization, in 1881, the throne passed to his son Alexander III (1881–1894), a staunch reactionary who revived the maxim of "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Respect to the People" of Nicholas I. A committed Slavophile, Alexander III believed that Russia could be saved from chaos only by shutting itself off from the subversive influences of Western Europe. In his reign Russia concluded the union with republican France to contain the growing power of Germany, completed the conquest of Central Asia and exacted important territorial and commercial concessions from China. The emperor's most influential adviser was Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, tutor to Alexander III and who tried to tutor Alexander's son the future Nicholas II, who refused. In the end, the son Nicholas became heavily liberal and devoted his life to securing freedom of the speech and press, freedom from censorship, freedom of religion, civil liberty, and a elected lower house of parilament. Twentieth Century, New Millenium Alexander III was suceeded by the liberal son, Nicholas II, in 1894. The Industrial Revolution began to exert a significant influence in Russia. The liberal elements among the industrial capitalists and nobility believed in peaceful social reform and a constitutional monarchy, forming the Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets. Social revolutionaries combined the Narodnik tradition and advocated the distribution of land among those who actually worked it—the peasants. Another radical group was the Social Democrats, exponents of Marxism in Russia. They advocated complete social, economic and political revolution. In 1903 in London the party split into two wings—the Mensheviks, or moderates, and the Bolsheviks, the radicals. The Mensheviks believed that Russian socialism would grow gradually and peacefully and that the emperor’s regime should be succeeded by a democratic republic in which the socialists would cooperate with the liberal bourgeois parties. The Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, advocated the formation of a small elite of professional revolutionists, subject to strong party discipline, to act as the vanguard of the proletariat in order to carry out massive social and politcal reforms. In 1904, Nicholas asked Lenin to come to Russia and made him his advisor on reforms. Russian troops suceeded in the Russo-Japanese War, forcing major concessions from Japan, but almost led to revolution. In January 1905, an incident known as "Bloody Sunday" occurred when Father Gapon led an enormous crowd to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to present a petition to the emperor. According to revolutionary propaganda, when the procession reached the palace, Cossacks opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds. The Russian masses were so aroused over the massacre that a general strike was declared demanding a democratic republic. This marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Soviets (councils of workers) appeared in most cities to direct revolutionary activity. Russia was paralyzed, and the government was desperate. Nicholas was appaled and he put the Cossacks on trial, convicting them and imprisioning them for killing them. He issued a statement expressing sorrow over Bloody Sunday, but the revolutionaries refused to listen. In October 1905, Nicholas issued the famous October Manfiesto, which ordered for the election of a Imperial Duma as the legislative lower house, extended the right to vote, and put in place basic civil liberties. After this, Nicholas said he loved his country and wished the new Duma would work with him to carry out massive reforms. In 1906, just before the first session of the Duma, the Emperor issued the Imperial Russian Constitution, the first legal consistutional statue in the Russian Empire. From 1905-1909, the Emperor and the Duma conducted massive liberal politcal, economic, social, and military reforms and restructured the country. During World War I, Russia at first suffered major defeats, but the patrotism and forceful will of the Russian people and military drove them on, and in the end, helped defeat Germany. During the 1920's, Vladmir Lenin served as Prime Minister. He molded the Russian welfare state and strengthened the government, while at the same time giving the people more control over their economic and personal lives. Lenin was extremely radically liberal and believed in an society of equality and fairness. His sucessor, Prime Minister Stalin, continued the same policies. On 22 June 1941, Germany invaded Russia and advanced deeply into the country. However harsh Russian winters and cunning Russian counteroffensives drove them back, and by 1945 Russia had reached Berlin. After the War, Russia became a nuclear weapons state and superpower. Russia supported the United States while at the same time improving it's economic ties within Europe and Asia. Today Russia is a modernized, powerful, and great country. Size and Territory Boundaries The administrative boundaries of European Russia, apart from Finland and its portion of Poland, coincides broadly with the natural limits of the East-European plains. In the North it meets the Arctic Ocean; the islands of Novaya Zemlya, Kolguyev and Vaigach also belong to it, but the Kara Sea is reckoned to Siberia. To the East it has the Asiatic dominions of the empire, Siberia and the central Asian provinces, from both of which it is separated by the Ural Mountains, the Ural River and the Caspian Sea — the administrative boundary, however, partly extending into Asia on the Siberian slope of the Urals. To the South it has the Black Sea and Caucasus, being separated from the latter by the Manych depression, which in Post-Pliocene times connected the Sea of Azov with the Caspian. The West boundary is purely conventional: it crosses the peninsula of Kola from the Varangerfjord to the Gulf of Bothnia; thence it runs to the Kurisches Haff in the southern Baltic, and thence to the mouth of the Danube, taking a great circular sweep to the West to embrace 3/4ths of Poland, and separating Russia from Prussia, the Slavic States and Romania. It is a special feature of Russia that it has few free outlets to the open sea other than on the ice-bound shores of the Arctic Ocean. Even the White Sea is merely a gulf of that ocean. The deep indentations of the gulfs of Bothnia and Finland are surrounded by what is ethnological Finnish territory, and it is only at the very head of the latter gulf that the Russians have taken firm foothold by erecting their capital at the mouth of the Neva. The Gulf of Riga and the Baltic belong also to territory which is not inhabited by Slavs, but by Baltic and Finnish peoples and by Germans. The East coast of the Black Sea belonga properly to Transcaucasia, a great chain of mountains separating it from Russia. But even this sheet of water is an inland sea, the only outlet of which, the Bosphorus, is in Turkish hands, while the Caspian, an immense shallow lake, mostly bordered by deserts, possesses more importance as a link between Russia and its Asiatic settlements than as a channel for intercourse with other countries. Territories Russia includes all of Urkaine(Dniper Urkaine and Crimea), Belarus, Beershabia, Finland (Grand Duchy of Finland), Armenia, Azerbajan, Geogria, Kazakhstan, Krygstan, Tajickstan, Turkmenstan, and Uzbekstan, Mongolia, parts of northeastern China, Lithuania, Lativa, and Estonia, as well roughly three-fourths of Poland and the provinces of Aradahan, Atrvin, Idgor, and Kars in Turkey. Between 1742 and 1867, Russia claimed Alaska as a colony. Following the Swedish defeat in the Finnish War and the signing of the Treaty of Fredrikshamn on September 17, 1809, Finland was incorporated into the Russian Empire as an autonomous grand duchy. The Emperor rules the Grand Duchy of Finland as a constitutional monarch through his governor and a native Finnish Senate appointed by him. Imperial external territories According to the Consistution of the Empire, Russia is one indivisible state, with the self-governing territories of the Grand Duchy of Finland and the Kingdom of Poland. From 1742-1867 the empire also governed the so called Russian Alaska. With the exception of this territory (modern day Alaska), the Russian Empire was a contiguous landmass spanning Europe and Asia. In this it differed from contemporary, colonial-style empires. The empire has maintained it's large territory while Britain and France have lost most of their colonies and dependencies. Furthermore, the empire also controls concession territories, notably the port of Kwantong, the Chinese Eastern Railroad Zone, and the concessions in Tianjin. Geography Russia is the largest country in the world with a total of approxmately 22 million square kilometers, or at least 11 million square miles. Russia's climates, vegetation, topsoil, and topgraphy spans wide distances. The country contains 24 UNSECO World Heritage Sites, 40 UNSECO Biosphere Reserves, 40 National Parks, and 101 nature Reserves. Russia has a wide resource base unmatched by any country, including major deposits of timber, petroleum, natural gas, coal, ores, and hundreds of other precious energy resources and minerals. Topgraphy Russia has five tography zones, the tundra, taiga, plains, arid and mountain zones. There are three plains, the East European Plain, the West Siberian Plain, and Turn Lowland, two plateaus, the Central Siberian Plateau and Kazkah Upland, and a series of mountinous areas in the north, central, and southernmost slopes. The West Siberian Plain, the world's largest, extends from the Urials to the Yensiey. Neverthless, Russia contains all but one of the vegetation zones known to exist. The northern forests of spruce, fir, pine, and larch, collectively known as the taiga, make up the largest natural zone of Russia, an area about the size of the United States. Here too the winter is long and severe, as witnessed by the routine registering of the world's coldest temperatures for inhabited areas in the northeastern portion of this belt. The taiga zone extends in a broad band across the middle latitudes, stretching from the Norwegian border in the west to the Verkhoyansk Range in northeastern Siberia and as far south as the southern shores of Lake Baykal. Isolated sections of taiga are found along mountain ranges, as in the southern part of the Urals, and in the Amur River Valley in the Far East. About 33 percent of the population lives in this zone, which, with the mixed forest zone, includeed most of the European part of Russia and the ancestral lands of the earliest Slavic settlers. Long associated with traditional images of Russian landscape and cossacks on horseback are the steppes, which are treeless, grassy plains. Although they cover only 15 percent of Russian territory, the steppes are home to roughly 44 percent of the population. They extend for 4,000 kilometers from the Carpathian Mountains in Dniper Urkaine across most of the northern portion of Kazakstan in Central Asia, between the taiga and arid zones, occupying a relatively narrow band of plains whose chernozem soils are some of the most fertile on earth. In a country of extremes, the steppe zone, with its moderate temperatures and normally adequate levels of sunshine and moisture, provides the most favorable conditions for human settlement and agriculture. Even here, however, agricultural yields were sometimes adversely affected by unpredictable levels of precipitation and occasional catastrophic droughts. Below the steppes, and merging at times with them, is the arid zone: the semideserts and deserts of Central Asia and, particularly, of the Kazakstan. Portions of this zone became cotton- and rice-producing regions through intensive irrigation. For various reasons, including sparse settlement and a comparatively mild climate, the arid zone has become the most prominent center for Russian space exploration. One-quarter of Russia consists of mountains or mountainous terrain. With the significant exceptions of the Ural Mountains and the mountains of eastern Siberia, the mountains occupy the southern periphery of Russia. The Urals, because they have traditionally been considered the natural boundary between Europe and Asia and because they are valuable sources of minerals, are the most famous of the country's nine major ranges. In terms of elevation (comparable to the Appalachians) and vegetation, however, they are far from impressive, and they do not serve as a formidable natural barrier. Truly alpine terrain is found in the southern mountain ranges. Between the Black and Caspian seas, for example, the Caucasus Mountains rise to impressive heights, marking a continuation of the boundary separating Europe from Asia. One of the peaks, Mount Elbrus, is the highest point in Europe at 5,642 meters. This range, extending to the northwest as the Crimean and Carpathian mountains and to the southeast as the Tien Shan and Pamirs, form an imposing natural barrier between Russia and its agressive Middle Eastern neighbors to the south. The highest point in Russia, at 7,495 meters, is Mount Kommunzina (Kamonzia) in the Pamirs near the border with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China. The Pamirs and the Tien Shan are offshoots of the tallest mountain chain in the world, the Himalayas. Eastern Siberia and the Far East are also mountainous regions, especially the volcanic peaks of the long Kamchatka Peninsula, which juttes down into the Sea of Okhotsk. The Far East, the southern portion of eastern Russia, and the Caucasus are Russia's centers of seismic activity. Russia has millions of bodies of water and thousands of rivers, providing it with one of the world's largest surface water resources. The largest and most prominent of Russia's bodies of fresh water is Lake Baikal, the world's deepest, purest, most ancient and most capacious freshwater lake. Lake Baikal alone contains over one fifth of the world's fresh surface water. Other major lakes include Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega, two largest lakes in Europe. When it comes to rivers, Russia is second only to Brazil by total renewable water resources. Of the country's 400,000 rivers, the Volga is the most famous, not only because it is the longest river in Europe but also because of its major role in Russian history. Climate Notorious cold and long winters have, understandably, been the focus of discussions on Russia's weather and climate. From the frozen depths of Siberia comes baby mammoths perfectly preserved, locked in ice for several thousand years. Millions of square kilometers experience half a year of subfreezing temperatures and snow covered over subsoil that was permanently frozen in places to depths of several hundred meters. In northeastern Siberia, not far from Yakutsk, hardy settlers cope with January temperatures that consistently average -50°C. Transportation routes, including entire railroad lines, have been redirected in winter to traverse rock-solid waterways and lakes. Howling Arctic winds that produce coastal wind chills as low as -152°C and the burany, or blinding snowstorms of the steppe, are climatic manifestations of Russia's close proximity to the North Pole and remoteness from oceans that tends to moderate the climate. A combination of the "Siberian high": cold, high-pressure systems in the east, together with wet, cold cyclonic systems in the west largely determine the overall weather patterns. The long, cold winter has a profound impact on almost every aspect of life in Russia. It affects where and how long people live and work and what kinds of crops are grown and where they are grown (no part of the country has a year-round growing season). The length and severity of the winter, along with the sharp fluctuations in the mean summer and winter temperatures, impose special requirements on many branches of the economy: in regions of permafrost, buildings must be constructed on pilings, and machinery must be made of specially tempered steel; transportation systems must be engineered to perform reliably in extremely low and high temperatures; the health care field and the textile industry are greatly affected by the ramifications of six to eight months of winter; and energy demands are multiplied by extended periods of darkness and cold. Despite its well-deserved reputation as a generally snowy, icy northern country, Russia includes other major climatic zones as well. According to Russian geographers, most of their country is located in the temperate zone, which for them included all of the European portion except the southern part of Crimea and the Caucasus, all of Siberia, the Russian Far East, and the plains of Russian Central Asia and the southern parts of the country. Two areas outside the temperate zone demonstrate the climatic diversity of Russia: the Russian Far East, under the influence of the Pacific Ocean, with a monsoonal climate; and the subtropical band of territory extending along the southern coast of Russia's most popular resort area, Crimea, through the Caucasus and into Russian Central Asia, where there are deserts and oases. With most of the land so far removed from the oceans and the moisture they provide, levels of precipitation in Russia is low to moderate. More than half the country receives fewer than forty centimeters of rainfall each year, and most of Russian Central Asia and northeastern Siberia could count on barely one-half that amount. The wettest parts are found in the small, lush subtropical region of the Caucasus and in the Russian Far East along the Pacific coast. Flora and fauna From north to south the East European Plain, also known as Russian Plain, is clad sequentially in Arctic tundra, coniferous forest (taiga), mixed and broad-leaf forests, grassland (steppe), and semi-desert (fringing the Caspian Sea), as the changes in vegetation reflect the changes in climate. Siberia supports a similar sequence but largely is taiga. Russia has the world's largest forest reserves, known as "the lungs of Europe", second only to the Amazon Rainforest in the amount of carbon dioxide it absorbs. Russian forests provide a huge amount of oxygen for not just Europe, but the whole world. There are 366 mammal species and 980 bird species in Russia. A total of 615 animal species have been included in the Red Data Book of the Empire as of 1997, and are now protected. Government and adminstration The Russian Empire is a semi-parilamentary aboslute monarchy, or "a autocratic emperor with democratic principles and a popuarly elected parilament with power and a appointed prime minister". Category:Nations Category:Empires Category:Powerful Nations Category:Influential Nations Category:Large Nations Category:Economic Powerhouses Category:Energy Superpowers Category:Mineral Powers Category:Articles with many categories Category:Long titles Category:Russian Empire Category:Parilamentary Governments Category:National Monarchies